Lizard Lover

A man stood over a lizard hole, waiting until the moment at which each lizard felt confident enough to show itself fully, then he stamped on it, to teach them to be more wary of emerging, he thought - forcing them to become more successful, to survive. He is in fact a tender-hearted lizard-lover, and the lizards are the emissaries of his emotions.

Chopin's Consumption

Achievements of inconceivable greatness and beauty are massacred every day in their own name, their desirability exploited not to inspire admiration but to feed a force of possessive greed. They are defiled by this desire, which sees the mindless consumer chewing gum and grinning inanely whilst sitting alongside the consumptive Chopin for a photo opportunity. Chopin’s weak, rattling cough is met with a clumsy slap on the back by the inhabitant of five star hotels who has driven him to his damp and draughty garret.

Smoke and Flowers

Le jour se leve - Marcel Carne. Jean Gabin, making a middle out of the margin. The central outsider, his mouth muscular from keeping those sharp lips pursed, he is the taciturn trumpeter of self-integrity. Helped by the frame of the screen, and the will of the eye to encompass, he defines the surrounding order, flushes it out, through a strongheaded opposition. The cinema of poetic realism is a cinema of resistance, of the misunderstood murderer, who killed to battle corruption.

Einstein Conscious

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it, says Einstein. He’s right. It would constitute a mortal blow to self integrity, and you would as likely then be absorbed by the state entirely, as remain in a state of limited acquiescence. It would open the floodgates of capitulation, and the conscience would go on, considering each little complicity a pragmatic treat, justified by some blind instinct of self preservation.

Suffolk Ate Nothing for a Day

The golf course backs on to the graveyard /Outside Maryland Station /Plinths and crosses watch stroke play rehearsals /Of putting into holes; /Repeated petitions to perfection.

Spider (to its enemies)

If you will fly... /There are webs in the chain, thickening, /And jewelled weavers that feed. /The spiders crawl, from link to link, /Trying their thread round the corners of circles.

Bacon 'n' Rothko

"That maroon - I just find it depressing. If I want to be depressed, I just go to that room with all that maroon... It's awful." (Bacon-Bragg: on Rothko) There were a lot of people who wanted to be depressed, apparently. Reverent public amongst the giant canvasses. Quite serene, nervously excited, looking. Rothko gives little and asks a lot. A sort of maximum minimalism. A paired down problematic of our basic position, binary, the background and the form, a representation of the membrane. Rothko is trying to characterise the core dynamic of perception, stripping his vision down to the principle of apprehension. In doing so he stands before us naked, like Gormley. At some point, as many, I became uncomfortable with this self-exposure, but not because of a problem with confronting the naked vision. There is a limit of how much interest a genital full frontal can arouse, again and again. But even here, especially here in fact, he eludes assimilation with his canvas mirrors. While he gives nothing, he provides a canvas that reflects the gaze of the looker, a photo-negative of the mind. A sort of nadir of the looking-seeing spectrum, where the two are nearly one, in the subject. The paintings were all of naked people. Lost souls and marooned minds. Bragg: "What are you optimistic about?" Bacon: "I'm optimistic about nothing. But I'm optimistic."